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Monday, February 13, 2012

We’ve all heard the concept. Calvinism renders God the author of sin and evil. This is simply a necessary consequence of the Calvinistic belief system. If God’s decrees, as taught by Calvinism, are true, then man has no ‘free will’.

Well…quite.

Of course, no true Christian can make a coherent claim for an absolute, unfettered free will. “Free agency” as advocated by Calvinists is ignored, and the charge of “determinism” is laid at our door. But what is actually meant by this is that, on Calvinism, we are reduced to nothing more than machines, controlled from above by the grand puppeteer. The biggest charge of all emanating from the incoherent mess that is Arminianism is the charge that Calvinism makes God the “author of sin”. Murmurs about “logic” can be heard, but they are rarely (if ever) substantiated. We will address this later.

God did not create the world on a whim, and He did not create man in order to then leave him to his own devices. God has His own reasons and purposes for creating, and He governs the world accordingly:

Isaiah 46:9-10

for I am God, and there is no other; I am God, and there is none like me,

10 declaring the end from the beginning and from ancient times things not yet done, saying, ‘My counsel shall stand, and I will accomplish all my purpose.’

Proverbs 19:21

Many are the plans in the mind of a man, but it is the purpose of the LORDthat will stand.

God didn’t create the world in order for human beings to dictate His plans. The counsel of God is immutable. And His counsel stands forever:

Isaiah 14:24,27

The LORD of hosts has sworn: “As I have planned, so shall it be, and as Ihave purposed, so shall it stand,

27 For the LORD of hosts has purposed, and who will annul it? His hand isstretched out, and who will turn it back?

Psalm 33:10-11

The LORD brings the counsel of the nations to nothing; he frustrates theplans of the peoples.

11 The counsel of the LORD stands for ever, the plans of his heart to all generations.

God’s purpose in creating the world is for His own glory and good pleasure:

Proverbs 16:4

The LORD has made everything for its purpose, even the wicked for the day oftrouble.

Revelation 4:11

“Worthy are you, our Lord and God, to receive glory and honour and power, foryou created all things, and by your will they existed and were created.”

God does not stand idle in the Church age:

Ephesians 1:11

In him we have obtained an inheritance, having been predestined according tothe purpose of him who works all things according to the counsel of hiswill

Philippians 2:13

for it is God who works in you, both to will and to work for his goodpleasure.

And all temporal blessings depend upon the providence of God:

Matthew 6:26

Look at the birds of the air: they neither sow nor reap nor gather intobarns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value thanthey?

James 1:17

Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from theFather of lights with whom there is no variation or shadow due tochange.

So where does this leave the agent‘s ‘free will’? Unfortunately, any notion of a libertarian free will was left behind at the fall. “Libertarian free will” must be considered a fad. And it is entirely unbiblical.

35 The slave does not remain in the house for ever; the son remains for ever.

36 So if the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed.

Freedom, as defined by the bible, is a freedom from the bondage of sin, the freedom to do what is pleasing to God. As Hendryx notes, “When Jesus says He will set people free, He does not say they are now free to choose good or evil but He will set them free from the bondage of sin. And where there is bondage, by definition there is no freedom.”

Of course, we affirm free agency, and man is certainly free to act and choose according to his greatest inclinations and desires. But the desires of man are in bondage to corruption.

Romans 6:16-18

Do you not know that if you present yourselves to anyone as obedient slaves,you are slaves of the one whom you obey, either of sin, which leads to death, orof obedience, which leads to righteousness?

17 But thanks be to God, that you who were once slaves of sin have becomeobedient from the heart to the standard of teaching to which you were committed,

18 and, having been set free from sin, have become slaves ofrighteousness.

2 Corinthians 3:17-18

Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there isfreedom.

18 And we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are beingtransformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another. For thiscomes from the Lord who is the Spirit.

Only God can grant us freedom from the bondage of sin, and until He does, men are enslaved to a different master:

Ephesians 2:1-3

And you were dead in the trespasses and sins

2 in which you once walked, following the course of this world, following theprince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons ofdisobedience-

3 among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out thedesires of the body and the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, like therest of mankind.

The proponent of libertarian free will would have us believe than man can act contrary to his desires and free from the determination of his own nature. This immediately leads one to ask: On this view, can man act contrary to his sinful nature and come to Christ without the prior work of the Holy spirit?

1 Corinthians 2:14

The natural person does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for theyare folly to him, and he is not able to understand them because they arespiritually discerned.

2 Timothy 2:25-26

correcting his opponents with gentleness. God mayperhaps grant them repentance leading to a knowledge of the truth,

26 and they may come to their senses and escape from the snare of the devil,after being captured by him to do his will.

It is God who allows man to come to a saving faith:

John 6:44

No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him. And I willraise him up on the last day.

John 6:63

It is the Spirit who gives life; the flesh is no help at all.

John 8:42-47Jesus said to them, If God were your Father, you would loveme, for I came from God and now am here. I have not come on my own; but he sentme.

43 Why is my language not clear to you? Because you are unable to hear what Isay.

44 You belong to your father, the devil, and you want to carry out yourfather's desire. He was a murderer from the beginning, not holding to the truth,for there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks his native language, forhe is a liar and the father of lies.

45 Yet because I tell the truth, you do not believe me!

46 Can any of you prove me guilty of sin? If I am telling the truth, whydon't you believe me?

47 He who belongs to God hears what God says. The reason you do not hear isthat you do not belong to God.

So much for libertarian free will.

But does this reduce human beings to mere robots in the great scheme of God’s decrees? I think it would be appropriate to turn to the specific (though unsubstantiated) claims that Calvinism promotes fatalism and that, accordingly, mankind must be absolved from moral accountability. Fatalism holds that everything we do we do necessarily. The argument goes something like this:

We can show the unnecessary transfer of the necessity over to the conclusion by way of a similar argument:

1. Necessarily, if John is a bachelor, John is unmarried.
2. John is a bachelor.
3. Therefore, John is necessarily unmarried.

Obviously John is by no means necessarily unmarried. It is not the case that John must be unmarried. John is unmarried yet perfectly free to be married. Again, the valid form of the argument is as follows:

1. Necessarily, if John is a bachelor, John is unmarried
2. John is a bachelor.
3. Therefore, John is unmarried.

So the valid form of this argument demonstrates that John is free to remain a bachelor or to be married. Just because God foreknows x, it does not follow that x must happen, only that it will happen.

Agents are free to either act or refrain according to their greatest inclinations and desires; whichever the agent chooses, God will have foreknown that choice. That choice is certain for God. But the choice is not necessary for the agent; the agent has freely made the choice. The agent could have made a different choice. And God would have infallibly foreknown that choice in eternity.

When the Calvinist speaks of God's decree, he is not necessarily always speaking of God’s active involvement. In many cases, God's "decretive will" may be expressed in His opting not to interfere with this or that choice, act or event, of which He had definite foreknowledge. And of course, without God’s foreordination no act or event could come to pass.

In the case of sin, while God knew that Adam and Eve would sin, He didn't cause them to do so in an active sense. He merely opted not to prevent it and in doing so allowed sin to enter the world in order to bring about His purpose; God not only allowed the fall, He knew that in creating man in the first place He was rendering it a certainty. He did so in order to achieve His greater purpose.

It is a gross misrepresentation to say Calvinism holds that God specifically acted to bring about sin or evil, rather than consciously willing not to prevent it. Those who present the caricature are either being wilfully dishonest or they’re failing to grasp the doctrines.

Once we see that, on Calvinism, God’s sovereign decrees are in complete harmony with man’s free agency and his moral accountability, the Arminian is backed into a corner. Not only has he failed to substantiate the charge laid at Calvinism (and more to the point God!), but the Calvinist has refuted the charge. But by the Arminian’s own standards, he must by necessity be wide-open to the exact same charge.

On the Arminian view, God creates a world in which many people will go to hell. No matter what He does to try and save them, they are going there, since God's knowledge of their destiny is infallible. There are no two ways about it; they are certain to spend eternity in hell. And yet He proceeds to create anyway. Why? Why create those people He knew for certain would spend eternity in hell? Why didn’t God just create those He knew would choose Christ? By creating them, God has effectively damned them for eternity. There’s no escaping it.

On the Arminian interpretation of foreknowledge and predestination, before the foundation of the world, God knew that John Bloggs would make a free decision to come to Christ. God knew of John’s free decision long before he was born. His decision to come to Christ was inevitable. Why was it inevitable? Was it down to John’s free will, even though he had not yet been born? The Arminian must be forced to concede that John’s destiny is predetermined. It is fixed. John can do nothing but be saved.

Here the Arminian is in all sorts of trouble. He has nowhere left to turn, since he has in no uncertain terms charged the sovereign God of scripture with being unjust, unfair, a monster, the author of sin, or whatever. The stick which he has chosen to throw at Calvinism has turned out to be a theological boomerang, a boomerang with dynamite attached to it, coming back at him and aiming straight between the eyes.

Tuesday, February 07, 2012

"For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth. For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse. For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools, and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things." (Romans 1:18-23)

All men have knowledge of God. This may seem like a strange statement to make in today's pluralistic, unbelieving society. Yet as a matter of common observation, all men live in God's universe, and cannot function apart from acknowledging Him in some way. The seeds of the Christian religion have been firmly planted in the minds of men, and God's handiwork has been made manifest to all (Psalm 19:1). All of men's endeavors rely on God's creative attributes and his Providence, without which knowledge as well as the ability to express that knowledge would be impossible. The myriad of false religions reveals that man has an innate knowledge of the divine, corrupted and incomplete though it may be. However, unless the mind is transformed by God Himself from it's depraved state, all ideas concerning God are, of necessity, based upon pure speculation. There is no shortage of idols that man may invent for himself in order to find a deity that will conform to the pleasures of his own deformed nature, even to the point of exchanging "the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things".

Yet the knowledge of the one true God is strong enough that failure to worship Him is inexcusable, placing both Jew and Gentile in the same dreadful mire, for according to verse 16, all men need the salvation which is revealed in the power of the gospel. "The wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men", being revealed to Jews through the law, as well as the gentiles by their reason. The fact that pagan nations had not the revealed law at their disposal did not excuse their sinfulness, because "what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them". The unbeliever may not proclaim ignorance of God or His laws, because he has an innate knowledge of both. Paul tells us that they "suppress the truth", not out of ignorance, but rather "by their unrighteousness".

Man, in his very nature being unrighteous and rebellious, is bound to raise a multitude of objections to such knowledge. The atheist and the agnostic are bound by intellectual autonomy. They assume that a world governed by undesigned chance and blind fate may obtain enough order to allow for scientific inquiry, and that the natural laws of the universe can result in a mind capable of objectively realizing such order to obtain meaningful knowledge. While they often call themselves "free-thinkers", their minds are imprisoned by their metaphysical commitment to a material-only worldview from which it can find no escape.

The relativist attempts to hide behind the limits of human knowledge. Nietzsche formulated the relativist mantra quite nicely. "There are no eternal facts, as there are no absolute truths" (Human, All Too Human). Obviously, this statement is self-defeating. There is no way that it can be true. Relativist "do-it-yourself" religion (Pluralism) relies on the frailty of the human mind in comparison to the immensity of God in order to deny God's revelation of Himself, (ie. “God is incomprehensible”). Yet oddly enough, the pluralist expects to be taken seriously when he or she expresses any facts about God.

All of man's objections to his knowledge of the Divine have ethical ramifications at their root. Wicked men love darkness and hate the light, because their deeds are evil (John 3:19). By either denying God or recreating Him in their own image, men seek to loose themselves from Divine Authority, thus enabling themselves to do what is “right in his own eyes" (Judges 21:25). For them, no thought is more comforting than the idea that their sins will die with them in the grave.

There is an ethical element to how one uses his mind, for the failure to acknowledge God leads to a "debased mind" (Romans 1:28). We are commanded to love God with all of our minds (Matthew 22:37), relinquishing all pretense of intellectual (and thus moral) autonomy and submitting to the One True and Living God. This autonomy may take many forms, from the Empiricism of William Clifford to the Relativism of Friedrich Nietzsche. Yet, as we shall see in this study, all forms of autonomy are built on the shifting sands of human wisdom and ultimately lead to an endless cycle of skepticism. The only option is for our minds to submit to the One who created it, the one who is Absolute Truth, in whom "we live and move and have our being". (Acts 17:28)